Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) -- If there’s one thing you can rely on
in U.S. equities markets lately, it’s buying on dips. Whoever
would suggest that things are finally headed south, that this
bull market is aging, that we’re pulling over into the slow lane
and, heck -- even headed for a bear market -- would look pretty
foolish today.

That would be Opening Line.

Actually, we had only been riffing off what we were reading
coming into the week -- that’s what we do here: we go a mile
wide and an inch deep -- so it’s not like we were making this
call. We were just promoting it.

Yeah, yeah -- stocks were lagging behind the rate of gains
at this point in the past couple years, P/E ratios are getting a
little heady, Janet Yellen’s slowly taking away the jelly
donuts.

It was described in Goldilocks-y terms after the market
closed yesterday.

“Today’s numbers were solid but not spectacular, and
that’s perfect in an environment where really robust economic
growth would not be positive,” Mount Lucas Management’s Tim
Rudderow told Jeremy Herron and Oliver Renick.

Which means this market is just right.

Unless you’re short. And why would you be? Where would you
get that idea?

***

The Fed releases the minutes from its July 29-30 FOMC
meeting at 2 p.m.

A smattering of retailers report earnings, including
Target, PetSmart, L Brands, Staples, Lowe’s, and American Eagle
Outfitters. Also reporting are Madison Square Garden and
Hewlett-Packard.

A short time ago, the BOE published the minutes of the MPC
August meeting, revealing the first split among policy makers in
more than three years.

***

- Islamic State cements its legacy.
- Israel and Hamas resume hostilities.
- Holder arrives in Ferguson, Missouri, today as calls grow
louder for the police shooter of Michael Brown to face criminal
charges.
- Another police-related fatal shooting happened yesterday a
couple miles away from Ferguson, Missouri, in north St. Louis.
Sounds like suicide by cop.
- Meanwhile, you know it’s bad in Ferguson when Egypt is calling
for police restraint.
- A grand jury investigating another death of an unarmed man at
the hands of police, Eric Garner in Staten Island, is expected
to start next month.
- Wade Miquelon was forced out as Walgreen CFO after
overestimating pharmacy sales by $1.1 billion, WSJ reports.
- Senator Mike Enzi easily wins Wyoming Republican primary, and
Dan Sullivan wins Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in
Alaska.
- Steve “Basket” Ballmer resigns from Microsoft’s board to
focus his attention on man-to-man defenses.
- Drug clinics in California may have perpetuated a $93 million
fraud through Medi-Cal payments, the state auditor finds.
- Turkey arrests 25 police officers amid Erdogan wiretapping
allegations.
- Islamic militants’ terrorism spree thwarted in Malaysia.
- High-school boys’ Columbine aspirations thwarted in
California.
- Doctors Without Borders accuses world of failing to help Ebola
in Africa.
- Bitcoin is money, judge rules.
- Twitter is the news. Facebook is the chatter.
- Three members of pope’s family killed in car wreck.
- Alan Turing receives full pardon from Queen Elizabeth.
- Taylor Swift video about shaking off criticism is roundly
criticized.
- The Minnesota Vikings and former punter Chris Kluwe settled
their dispute without a lawsuit.
- The NFL is going to try to make music artists pay to play its
Super Bowl halftime show, the WSJ reports.
- Mo’ne Davis becomes the first Little Leaguer on the cover
of Sports Illustrated.
- ’Til death do us part.

***

Argentina has decided to make a break for it.

Desperate to find a way out of the cage it put itself in,
the defaulted nation is going ahead with a plan to go native. It
will let debt holders exchange foreign-currency bonds for new
ones subject to domestic laws and paid through the Argentine
central bank instead of the U.S. trustee, Bank of New York
Mellon, and allow those opting to keep their notes also to be
paid locally.

It will also have a window for the holdouts, Paul Singer’s
Elliott Management and Aurelius Capital, should they change
their minds and agree to accept the terms that are being
dictated to them.

Which will probably not make things go any easier for them
in Judge Thomas Griesa’s New York courtroom. Guess they figured
they don’t have much more to lose, right?

Citigroup is probably breathing a little easier. This
decision appears to help it sidestep the issue of being caught
between Griesa’s previous ruling blocking interest payments to
exchange bondholders until the holdout bondholders get paid 100
cents on the dollar and Argentina’s demand that the bank proceed
with making payments to customers holding the country’s debt.

We wonder if this development is going to pre-empt the
commercials we were hoping to see. American television viewers
were being pulled into the legal showdown through advertisements
-- paid propaganda, to be honest -- from the holdout hedge funds
decrying the fate of Argentines who held the country’s debt.

One 60-second commercial focuses on the case of a woman who
lost her life savings after buying government notes to pay for
the care of her 97-year-old father. “Argentina, these people
deserve better,” the narrator intones.

It’s a response to the full-page newspaper advertisements
Argentina has taken out in newspapers around the world ripping
Griesa and the hedge funds.

We don’t see why they’d pull the ads because the show is
surely not over.

***

Yesterday’s installment on the Allergan-Valeant saga -- the
resignation of Jeff Edwards as Allergan’s chief financial
officer -- brought a few of you out of the woodwork, which was
encouraging because we really have no idea whether you people
read this for sport or are actually paying attention.

For one day, at least, we got your attention.

One reader pointed out that it’s unclear just exactly what
the terms of Edwards’s employment contract are, and that it
might be wrong to assume that he’d be leaving money on the table
if he walked away just before a change in ownership.

That was the impression that came from BMO Capital Markets’
David Maris in a research note yesterday, in which he also noted
that, instead of the resignation being a bad omen, it “may be a
sign that a strategic transaction marking a new chapter in
Allergan’s growth may be nearing.”

Which certainly got more interesting when the Wall Street
Journal reported yesterday that Allergan may be in the hunt for
Salix Pharmaceuticals, a deal that would add a layer or two of
complication to the uber-hostile, $53 billion takeover attempt
by Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square and Michael Pearson’s Valeant.

The reactions from the parties’ shares didn’t help much.
Salix rose, naturally, which only adds to its market value and
thus the expense of Valeant’s proposed buyout of Allergan should
Allergan complete that deal.

Allergan rose, probably because the prospect of a defensive
acquisition bolsters its defense as well as adds the wrinkle of
a possible inversion play: Salix itself is in the middle of
trying to buy an Ireland-based unit of Cosmo Pharmaceuticals,
the Journal reports. Although there’s no telling whether
Allergan would go for the Cosmo stuff as well as Salix.

And Valeant rose because...Why did Valeant rise? Because
investors see the Allergan-Salix news as a sign this tractor
pull that apparently had started to weigh on Valeant shares
might finally be coming to an end? A relief rally?

Anyway, we called Allergan to see if anyone would tell us
the particulars of Edwards’s employment contract.

Nope.

***

Thinking about your Christmas shopping yet? Economic
forecasters are.

As Anna-Louise Jackson and Anthony Feld report, inbound-container traffic at two key ports in California suggest U.S.
retailers are preparing for a busy holiday season. Chris
Christopher, director of U.S. consumer economics at IHS Global
Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts, forecasts retail sales will
grow 4.2 percent in November and December on a year-over-year
basis, compared with 3.1 percent in both 2013 and 2012.

This has potentially positive implications not just for
big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s
and Sears., but also for the companies that carry the
merchandise, including A.P. Moeller-Maersk, Swift
Transportation, Werner Enterprises and J.B. Hunt.

Predicting December sales in August seems like one of the
more complicated tasks in economic forecasting, combining as it
does variability in consumer confidence, unpredictable wintry
weather, transportation snafus and, this year, the chance of a
labor disruption.

The calendar shows that, with Black Friday on Nov. 28,
there are 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year,
one more than last year. So that’s something. On the other hand,
it’s still five days shorter than the longest holiday shopping
season possible.

A recent Gallup Poll found that 45 percent of Americans
report spending more today than they were a year ago, versus 18
percent spending less. On the other hand, the poll found we’re
spending our money on utilities and health care, rather than on
the activities and items we actually want.

And what will we want, once the Thanksgiving turkey is in
our bellies?

Yet more singing ice princesses, it appears. Or maybe a
monster with gas issues. Better soundproof that playroom.

***

Tomorrow is the start of the Kansas City Fed’s three-day
economic policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and you know
what that means.

Not much, probably.

Janet Yellen’s speech is likely to track well-telegraphed
themes, and by the sounds of this handy guide by Matthew Boesler
and Simon Kennedy on what to look for, Mario Draghi will have
more to talk about.

Yellen will be all about wage growth and persistent slack
in the labor market and about the seemingly never-ending need to
continue stimulus, even though things are looking up, generally,
with scant inflation.

Draghi, however, has some issues on his hand, with
stagnating economies and the lingering risks of deflation that
aren’t being helped by the euro -- or Yellen’s dovish stance.

Meanwhile, we would kill to be there with, say, a 9-foot,
5-weight Sage rod, a floating line and some grasshopper
patterns.

***

Sure, some people may say the immediacy of a Scripps
Networks takeover is slim, but you can’t tell that from its
price.

We tend to jump for anything Tara Lachapelle writes because
the smartest stories make our job easier, and she finds that in
the days following 21st Century Fox’s aborted attempt to buy
Time Warner Inc., Scripps has risen to match Time Warner’s
multiple based on expectations it’s going to be a target.

She writes Discovery Communications had been kicking the
tires last year, and throws Viacom and Disney in the discussion,
while citing Wunderlich Securities as saying price might be an
issue.

With those potential pockets, we don’t see how.

***

Seventy percent of pay-TV subscribers in the Los Angeles
area have been missing a great season because Time Warner Cable
has been holding them hostage in a contest over what it wants to
charges competing TV services for airing the games to which TWC
has the rights.

Then again, it could get worse.

That’s the concern voiced by those who see the pending
$42.5 billion acquisition of TWC by Comcast as having the
potential to take those subscribers from the frying pan to the
fire, and it’s why the deal could risk foundering.

Todd Shields and David McLaughlin report that amid
regulatory scrutiny of a deal that will only concentrate
ownership and power if Comcast wins TWC, this is exactly the
kind of power authorities worry about when reviewing a deal.

Especially when the power’s about to shift into the hands
of a company that’s been found to employ the same tactics. When
Comcast bought NBC Universal, it had to agree to arbitration in
pricing disputes because it had “cut the satellite-TV share in
its home market by withholding professional baseball, basketball
and hockey programming,” Shields and McLaughlin report, citing
the FCC order.

Writing as we are from Comcast’s hometown, we can tell you
that there is cause for concern. Moreover, the cost of sports
programming now is officially insane. Because of player
salaries.

***

More and more, golf looks like the new tennis.

For a while the two country-club sports were moving in
opposite directions, like bond prices and yields. Tennis was in
decline as an American pastime, be it at the local park or on
television. Golf, with a Tiger on its side, was soaring as if it
were hit by a 9-iron.

Now golf is struggling too.

The latest indicator: Dick’s Sporting Goods, the chain of
choice for many a weekend warrior, is getting out of the game.
It took a $14.3 million impairment charge on its golf trademarks
and wrote down $2.4 million worth of clubs, balls and apparel in
the most recent quarter and laid off almost all of its in-store
golf pros in July, Kyle Stock reports at Bloomberg Businessweek.

The moves were inevitable, given the decline in
participants, the lack of interest among millennials and the
closing of courses around the U.S.

As for the 560-plus Dick’s stores around the country,
squeezing out golf will presumably make more room for equipment
related to ascendant activities, such as yoga, or kettlebells,
or for those fold-out chairs with a spot for your beer.